ASU News, February 8, 2022.
Virtual conference convenes education leaders from around the world to consider a redesign of the classroom.
America does not have a shortage of licensed teachers. It does, however, have a shortage of people who want to teach.
High pressure. Low pay. Little encouragement. More responsibilities heaped on each year. These are a few of the reasons the profession is bleeding personnel.
But that could change if educational institutions consider systemic and structural approaches that spark imagination, encourage collaboration and improve outcomes for both teachers and students.
That’s one of the many insights that emerged at Next Education Workforce Summit 2022, a virtual conference hosted last week by Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College.
“We need to think about school communities as teams. We have to think about how to build a team of adults around us that may include key school personnel and outside key personnel,” said keynote speaker John B. King Jr., president of the Education Trust and former U.S. Secretary of Education during the Obama administration. “The important thing is that young people have powerful, positive relationships with adults who are helping them acquire the skills they need for long-term success. … We also need to think about how do we shift our culture to a continuous improvement culture.”
In addition to King, other experts who led conversations about these topics — collaborative partnerships, school funding, policies, inclusivity, teacher retention, infusing tutoring in the classroom, workforce pipeline and team-teaching models — were Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association; Patricia Levesque, CEO of Excelin Ed; Bryan Hassel, co-president of Public Impact; David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and professor of education at Johns Hopkins University; Sarah Beal, executive director of US PREP; and Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education.